The city's chefs have been getting creative with local ingredients, ranging from Atlantic seafood to produce from the Annapolis Valley

Restaurants line an avenue in The Hydrostone, an area in the North End of Halifax.

Photograph by: Katrina Swift
, For Postmedia News

The sandwich board outside a Halifax restaurant reads "fresh, creative, local." That, in a nutshell, is the message of this maritime city. After a week of climbing Citadel Hill, strolling along the revamped waterfront and taking in the lively local music scene, we came away with this refrain: Eating in Halifax has a new complexion, one of fresh, local ingredients, inventively prepared.

Move over, fish and chips. The maritime standard still exists, as do lobster rolls and mussels, but the city is replete with restaurants serving organic, fair-trade and local goods - with a little vegan thrown in for good measure - supported in no small part by a healthy, environmentally aware population of young people.

For starters, there are more than 450 food establishments in this city of around 400,000.

The city has a relatively young population (more than 50 per cent are under 40); and within an 80-kilometre radius, there are eight universities and colleges, with a total of nearly 30,000 students.

While young residents are probably the impetus, as well as some of the owners, of this organic, local food movement, the types of restaurants committed to this philosophy vary wildly.

One perennial winner of the Halifax food awards (best fine dining, best use of local ingredients) doled out by the Coast, the popular weekly tabloid, is the owner of that aforementioned sandwich board. At Chives Canadian Bistro on busy Barrington St., chef Craig Flinn sources locally and comes up with inventive dishes and wine pairings.

In the large dining room - charcoal and lime green walls set against industrial charcoal ceiling, a banquette lining one wall under a series of seascapes - there's a hum of activity on a spring evening. This was once a Bank of Nova Scotia, and the owners have made use of the main floor vault, turning it into a wine cellar-cum-private dining room.

We order, then delectable buttermilk biscuits appear, alongside whipped butter and sweet molasses. Our starters include a salad of candied celeriac with pear, walnuts, cranberries and blue cheese, and a smoked salmon bruschetta with lemon ricotta and red onion. We sample a Nova Scotia lamb served with toasted barley risotto and chestnut gravy while the non-meat-eater among us swoons over the "seafood hodgepodge" with lobster, scallops and haddock.

"I honestly believe that most of the restaurants in Halifax, especially owned by independent chefs and young restaurateurs - even some of the hotels now - are changing to a local diet," Flinn says. "We've seen a big change in what the Halifax market is demanding - people are questioning star fruit and kiwis in February."

In addition to growing heirloom tomatoes, zucchini, lettuce, peas and other vegetables on a farm in the Annapolis Valley for use in his restaurant, Flinn has written three cookbooks, all focusing on fresh, local foods.

"Small, conscientious farming is what people want," agrees Dennis Johnston, chef and owner of Fid, the restaurant that very likely started the farm-to-table movement in Halifax.

Johnson was trained in Europe and in Montreal under chef Jean Pierre Monnet at Les Halles and Les Mignardises. He and his wife came to Halifax for a slower pace, and Fid was born.

Johnston has been a member of the Slow Food movement since 1989 and the restaurant has been local since opening at its present location in 2002. He frequents the Halifax Farmers' Market and local producers to bring back the vegetables he loves to serve, in a French-Asian mix.

"I find that with vegetables, there's so much texture, variety and colour," he says. The restaurant website (fidresto.ca) lists all the farmers and foragers who supply the restaurant with mostly organic, sustainably harvested foods.

Lunch in the simple, pale-wood dining room at Fid might include warm smoked haddock with a potato-spinach mash and poached egg or organic local fingerling potato salad, while the early spring dinner menu features crispy Arctic char with wok-fried vegetables and a spicy black bean sauce, roasted free-range chicken breast with greens, button mushrooms and fresh potato gnocchi or roasted Atlantic monkfish with garlic peashoots and roasted parsnips. A variety of vegan dishes are also served.

The splendid brunch served at the bistro-style Jane's on the Common, situated - you guessed it - just across from the famed Halifax Common, offers inventive dishes created with local produce and sustainably harvested fish and seafood. The fish cakes, made with lobster, scallop and haddock, are served with a citrus caper aioli; the grilled cheese sandwich with tomato butter.

Organic and local isn't relegated only to the fine dining establishments in Halifax. At The Wooden Monkey, a casual two-storey diner on busy Grafton Street, owners Lil Mac-Pherson and Christine Bower keep the focus on local and organic food and locally brewed beer and wine. The down-home look - wide-planked pine floor, mismatched tables and chairs, tin border around the ceiling - makes their serious effort look casual.

Here, all soups are made with spring water, all breads from scratch. At lunch, we sampled a heaping plate of mussels in a garlicky broth, fusilli with Digby scallops and sun-dried tomatoes and blackened haddock with salsa. They offer a range of homemade pizzas and bowls including a Nova Scotia seafood chowder of tomato, haddock, scallops, lobster, mussels and potato, served with "house-made spelt baguette."

And there's more to Halifax dining than the waterfront area. In the North End section of the city, an architecturally unique neighbourhood known as The Hydrostone has become a thriving restaurant destination, where diners can also appreciate the effect of a most devastating tragedy that befell the city in 1917. In that year, the deadly Halifax Explosion levelled much of the North End. The Hydrostone neighbourhood was part of the rebuilding efforts, and was made primarily out of cinder blocks.

Registered as a National Historic Site, The Hydrostone was designed around boulevards with treed, grassy centre lanes, part of the "garden city movement." Today, the commercial spaces house many restaurants, with terrasses for soaking up the sun. They include delectable Japanese and Thai food at Hamachi Kita Sushi, and Asian Fare, one of four Hamachi restaurants around town, whose menu offers vegetarian and vegan dishes.

Even café-goers can get their organic/local mix at places like Heartwood Café, a vegetarian paradise serving organic black bean burritos, portobello mushroom burgers served on focaccia, and more.

But the most talked about kid on the block, and winner of the 2011 Best Café award by The Coast, is Two If By Sea. It originated across the harbour in Dartmouth and now has a second location in the corner of a historic building on the city's bustling waterfront. Here, mounds of plain, almond and prosciutto stuffed croissants vie for space on the zinc-lined counter with oversized cookies and bagels flown in regularly from Montreal (all right, not local, but what cachet!), to be washed down with smooth organic, fair-trade coffee served in its myriad of contemporary variations.

Each new locally sourced restaurant, each organic designation is another example of the forward-looking foodie life now being lived in this bustling maritime city. "Using fresh ingredients is where we're all headed," Chef Flinn says. "And we're getting there."

IF YOU GO

The Halifax Seaport Farmers Market, located since 2010 in a sustainably designed building on the waterfront at 1209 Marginal Road/Pier 20, is open Tuesday to Friday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Earlier openings on Saturdays and Sundays. Up to 160 vendors sell on the weekends. Check halifaxfarmersmarket.com

Vendors still sell in the historic brewery building, now called the Brewery Market, at 1496 Lower Water St. Saturdays only, from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m.

Chives Canadian Bistro (chives. ca) is located at 1537 Barrington St., 902-420-9626.

Fid is open from Thursday to Saturday for breakfast and lunch, and brunch on Sunday. Located at The Courtyard, 1569 Dresden Row. Check fidresto. ca or call 902-422-9162

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